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144

CATTLE-STEALING.

LECT. V.

offerings made to him on the ceremony of his circumcision, benevolences levied from his tribe, fines and confiscations, and the results of predatory excursions.

The remarkable part played by kine in ancient Irish society will, I hope, be made more intelligible in the next Lecture. Meantime, let me observe that the two Celtic societies included in these islands which longest retained their ancient usages were both notoriously given to the plunder of cattle. Lord Macaulay, in speaking of Irish cattle-stealing, sometimes, I must own, seems to me to express himself as if he thought the practice attributable to some native vice of Irish character; but no doubt it was what Mr. Tylor has taught us to call a survival, an ancient and inveterate habit, which in this case continued through the misfortune which denied to Ireland the great condition of modern legal ideas, a strong central government. The very same practice, among the Celts of the Scottish Highlands and the rude Germanic population of the Lowland Border, has almost been invested by one man's genius with the dignity of a virtue. Again, turning to 'Waverley,' I suppose there is no truer representative of the primitive Celtic chief than Donald Bean Lean, who drives the cattle of Tully Veolan, and employs a soothsayer to predict the number of beeves which are likely to come in his way. He is a far more genuine 'survival' than Fergus McIvor, who all but deserts his cause for a disappointment about an earldom.

LECT. V.

THE STATUS OF THE COMPANIONS.

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It has been pointed out that the status of the King's Companions was at first in some way servile. Whenever legal expression has to be given to the relations of the Comitatus to the Teutonic kings, the portions of the Roman law selected are uniformly those which declare the semi-servile relation of the Client or Freedman to his Patron. The Brehon law permits us to take the same view of the corresponding class in Celtic societies. Several texts indicate that a Chief of high degree is always expected to surround himself with unfree dependants; and you will recollect that the retinue of the King of Erin was to consist not only of free tribesmen but of a bodyguard of men bound to him by servile obligations. So far as it goes, I quite agree with the explanation which Mr. Freeman has given of the original connection between servile status and that nobility with which the primitive nobility of birth has become mixed up and confounded. The lowly clientage,' he says, 'of the Roman Patrician and the noble following of the Hellenic and Teutonic leader may really come from the same source, and may both alike be parts of the same primeval heritage.' ('Comparative Politics,' p. 261.) But perhaps we may permit ourselves to go a step beyond this account. The Comitatus or Companions of the Chief, even when they were freemen, were not necessarily or ordinarily his near kindred. Their dependence on

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146

SERVILE POSITION OF COMPANIONS.

LECT. V.

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him, carrying with it friendship and affection, would in modern societies place them in a position well understood, and on something like an equality with him; but in the beginning of things one man was always the kinsman, the slave, or the enemy of another, and mere friendship and affection would, by themselves, create no tie between man and man. In order that they might have any reality, they would have to be considered as establishing one of the relations known to that stage of thought. Between equals this would be assumed or fictitious kinship. But between the Chief who embodied purity of tribal descent and his associates, it would have more or less to follow the pattern of the slave's dependence on his master, and, where the Companion was not actually the Chief's slave, the bond which connected them would very probably be adapted to the more honourable inodel furnished by the relation between exslave and ex-master.

LECT. VI.

OXEN IN PRIMITIVE TIMES.

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LECTURE VI.

THE CHIEF AND THE LAND.

THE Brehon law-tracts strongly suggest that, among the things which we in modern times have most forgotten, is the importance of horned cattle, not merely in the infancy of society, but at a period when it had made some considerable advance towards maturity. It is scarcely possible to turn over a page without finding some allusion to beeves, to bulls, cows, heifers, and calves. Horses appear, sheep, swine, and dogs; and bees, the producers of the greatest of primitive luxuries, have a place assigned to them as an article of property which has something corresponding to it in old Roman law. But the animals much the most frequently mentioned are kine. There are some few facts both of etymology and of legal classification which point to the former importance of oxen. Capitale kine reckoned by the head_cattle-has given birth to one of the most famous terms of law and to one of the most famous terms of political economy, Chattels and Capital. Pecunia was

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OXEN IN PRIMITIVE TIMES.

LECT. VI.

probably the word for money which was employed by the largest part of mankind for the longest time ll together. But oxen, though they have furnished a modern synonym for personal property, were not, I need scarcely say, classed in the lower order of commodities in all ancient systems of law. The primitive Roman law placed them in the highest class, and joined them with land and slaves as items of the Res Mancipi. As in several other instances, the legal dignity of this description of property among the Romans appears to answer to its religious dignity among the Hindoos. Kine, which the most ancient Sanscrit literature shows to have been eaten as food, became at some unknown period sacred, and their flesh forbidden; and ultimately two of the chief 'Things which required a Mancipation' at Rome, oxen and landed property, had their counterpart in the sacred bull of Siva and the sacred land of India.

The subject has possibly been obscured by an impression that horned cattle were only of preeminent importance to mankind in that pastoral stage of society which has been the theme of so much not altogether profitable speculation. The actual evidence seems to show that their greatest value was obtained when groups of men settled on spaces of land and betook themselves to the cultivation of food-grains. It is very possible that kine were at first exclusively valued for their flesh and milk, but

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